Twee Magazine

The Nottingham Goose Fair.

Like food itself, foodyism comes in a lot of flavors. Hippies have a sort of foody culture that largely focuses on food as medicine, offering up ancient grains and vegan recipes as cures for physical and social ills. Hipsters have a foodyism that is part international adventure and part affected nostalgia, combining meals from far-flung countries with deep-fried Oreos and cheap beer.

BBC Radio 4's "The Kitchen Cabinet," now in its tenth series, offers a vision of foodyism for the terminally twee. The show borrows from a rather common English broadcast format, the panel show, in which a group of experts or comedians gather around a microphone to entertain. In fact, "The Kitchen Cabinet" lifts heavily from a specific panel show called "Gardeners Question Time," in which some very serious garden specialists traveled around the British Isles to give advice to locals.

So "The Kitchen Cabinet" travels the same paths, but the results are quite different. In part, it's because the show's panel is deeply eccentric, led by author and food critic Jay Rayner, who once wrote a novel in which a hostage situation was complicated by the fact that it took place in a restaurant and one of the criminals instantly developed an obsession with the business of fine dining. Rayner sardonically poses questions to guests such as food historian Annie Gray, who specializes in ancient cookbooks and often shows up with 300-year-old recipes that the rest find inedible. Another frequent guest is Glasgow-native Rachel McCormack, who has developed an absolute obsession with Catalan cooking but retains her Scottish churlishness -- in one recent episode, she hollered at an Irish audience about the superiority of Scotch whisky. Guests sometimes include food scientists, food psychologists, and an endless rotating assortment of specialty chefs.

Because the show travels, it demonstrates a great interest in the culinary history of wherever it ends up, and so listeners discover such oddities as the Nottingham Goose Fair, featured in a recent episode, which dates back more than 700 years, which started as a market and quickly turned into a carnival, and where you can buy candies shaped like cockerels on a stick. ("Yes," says the manufacturer in a long, deadpan monotone, "they are shaped like cockerels on a stick.") Because the show's chefs are absolutely barking mad, they often regale their local audience with tales of slow-roasting sheep in their tiny gardens, or dragging trays filled with blood through London's tube service, or filling an entire cow with hundreds of tiny sausages.

They also take questions from the audience, which means that a farmer in Shropshire, asking about nettles, is liable to learn that they make a very good Catalan Suquet de Peix, or might be frozen with CO2 and then added in to ice cream, or as filling for a rolled up cow's face, or something equally puzzling.

The Guardian recently asked how twee is too twee in food presentation, complaining about the fussiness found in modern food presentation, such as heavily decorated cupcakes and rainbow deviled eggs. But "The Kitchen Cabinet" is a show for people who feel that those examples don't go far enough -- that its entirely natural to cook a bird inside another bird inside another bird, or that its reasonable to discuss digging your own caves to preserve cheeses, or that blood is a profoundly underutilized ingredient. There's an abundance of what Dr. Peter Hughes Jachimiak once called "a hyper-real version of Englishness" and "Middle-English tweeness." And it's irresistible.